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Figuring out which niche to target is the stumbling point for a lot of wannabe affiliates. As I mentioned in my post on how to research a niche, I’ve stumbled on some of my niches completely by chance  others I found and targeted.

If you’re reading this article then you likely didn’t stumble upon a niche by chance. Instead, you’re looking to find and target a niche. But how?

You can find a list of obvious niches anywhere. We all know there’s money in finance and weight loss. Unfortunately, finding a good, lesser known niche is hard work. And finding a niche that is both profitable and achievable? Well, you’re not going to find anyone handing those out. I know  it kind of makes you feel like this

So how do you find that elusive, awesome niche for your affiliate business?

How to find kickass niche market ideas

I won’t hand you a good niche on a platter  but I will give you some tips for finding one on your own.

Look at your hobbies

I can’t do a post on finding a website niche without stating the obvious. If you have a hobby or something that you truly love doing  looking at how you could potentially turn that niche into something profitable for you is the first place to start.

But not everyone has a profitable hobby. Me? I puzzle (yes, seriously). Despite being an avid puzzler, I know I don’t spend time reading blogs about puzzling, nor am I looking for the latest news on puzzling. When I want a new puzzle, I go to Amazon and buy one. I suspect most other puzzlers are the same. Not to mention the volume of puzzles I’d need to sell at 5% commission on a $10 item to make any decent money.

Poll your friends, family  poll via your status on Facebook if you need to  and find out what the people you know spend their spare time doing. But don’t tell them why.

It’s not that I care if they know I’m looking for niche ideas  it’s that telling them I’m looking for a new profitable niche and then asking them the question means they might filter their answers looking to give you an answer that they believe would be profitable.

For instance, let’s say you have a friend who likes to home brew their beer. They might look at your question and think “he can’t make money home brewing beer” and not answer the question. When in reality, you’re not looking to make money from actually doing the hobby yourself  you’re looking to make money from selling people like your friend the supplies. And brewing beer from home can be a pricey hobby.

Getting their answers without predisposing them is important. It’s up to you to research their interests for potential profitability.

Look at all kinds of hobbies

Doing a search on Google for “expensive hobbies” or “pricey hobbies” or “most popular hobbies” or “unsual hobbies” will give you a ton of potential niche ideas if you’re willing to dig deep into the results. You’re looking for something on those lists you could see yourself really getting into if the profitability is there.

Pay attention to supplies to find demand

A quick search on whatever your favorite (robust) keyword tool is for “supplies” can be pretty revealing. Running that search on SEMRush brings me back over 56,000 results. People looking for supplies are looking for them because they need them to do something. They use them in a niche.

Scouring through those results can help you identify a “something” you could get behind being interested in. And you can sort the results by estimated CPC or traffic volume while doing so.

Accessorize, Accessorize, Accessorize

People buy accessories for all kinds of things. When most people hear “accessories” they think things like clothing and phones. But, a search on SEMRush returns 32,000 search terms with the words “accessories” in them for items you may not have even known existed.

One that caught my eye as I scanned the results was “garage slatwall accessories”  what the hell is a slatwall? Turns out they’re systems for hanging stuff on the walls in garages, offices and other open spaces.

A quick subsequent search shows me that “slatwalls” has a decent traffic volume for such a niche item, the estimated CPCs are pretty dang high and the SERPs for the term are totally doable. To me, this would be worthy of running through the complete niche research test.

It’s possible a site targeting garage organization might be in order. And I’m betting there’s tons of other organization systems in addition to slatwalls that could help folks get the task done. Keep the domain broad and you can expand into other areas of home organization if the site goes well.

This is one idea generated from what I saw in the first page of results for a term that returned 32,000 results. Dig deep and you can find some real gems.

Find a magazine

There are tons of niche magazines out there. If they’re printing a magazine for a niche, then there is a probably a monetizeable audience surrounding said niche.

You can head over to a site like Magazines.com and browse through the thousands of magazines they offer subscription options for. I certainly had never even heard of “woodturning” before much less knew there was a magazine dedicated to it (along with some search volume, okay CPCs and not much strong search competition).

Scour the affiliate networks

This can be time consuming depending on how well organized the network is, but you can often find unique markets while looking through the various merchants that are running affiliate programs for niches you might not even have known existed.

For instance, I had no idea that buying lobsters online was a “thing” until I started seeing a ton of affiliate programs popping up for  would you call them lobster retailers?  a few years back.

Pay to access professional market research

Not every idea for niche research is free. In professionally done market research you can often find much more in depth information than what you sometimes can piece together online via reports like the The 2012-2013 Leisure Market Research Handbook and the State of the Industry: Hobby, Toy, and Game Stores in the U.S.  whatever the niche, there is likely a market research report centered around it that tells you exactly what consumers are spending money on (and how much of it).

If you get serious about entering a niche, it sometimes can be well worth the purchase.